1. Field of the Invention
There is a need to store large amounts of digital data for long periods of time in an error-free manner. These data are originally in digital format or are data that have been digitally scanned from original content. The data are to be stored as replacement for storage of the original content, or the data are to be stored in parallel to the storage of the original content. For instance, historians store historical documents and images in archives, and the military, police and security forces store vast amounts of information such as military maps, manuals, war records, fingerprint files, and iris recognition files. Still other types of information that are stored in mass are patent records, census records, geospatial records, images collections, and sound records of music and speeches.
2. Background of the Related Art
At various times in the period of the data storage, needs can arise for accessing the stored data. When data are needed for retrieval, the accessed data must be accurate. Thus, the data must be accessible, while at the same time the stored data must remain error-free and uncorrupted.
Conventional current-era digital data storage media useful for mass data storage have limited lifetimes before degradations and failures start to occur. Another drawback of digital data storage is that the equipment used to write to or read from stored data may no longer be available or operative 20 or 30 or 40 years from now, and new equipment may not be compatible with the old equipment. As the needs for digital data storage capacity increase, manufacturers will continue to bring out new storage equipment to meet these needs. However, making these new machines so as to be xe2x80x9cbackwards read-compatible,xe2x80x9d meaning that they can read old data stored many years ago, is technically difficult and expensive, and sometimes impossible.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a method and system for the long-term, error-free storage of digital data files. It is another object of the invention to provide a long-term storage system in which the storage media are not connected to outside users. It is another object of the invention to provide a long-term storage system in which the storage media are written-to one time only.
It is another object of the invention to provide a long-term storage system in which data are written from a source file, and then are verified and compared with the source file. It is another object of the invention to provide a long-term storage system in which the stored data are accessible without possibility of corrupting the stored data file. It is yet another object of the invention to provide a long-term storage system having error-free migration of stored data from current-era storage media to new-era storage media, thus to provide the solution to the xe2x80x9cbackwards read-compatiblexe2x80x9d problem.
In accordance with these and other objects, the archival system of the present invention includes a controller and multiple storage media that are used to archive digital data. The archival system verifies that the original data remains error-free and uncorrupted, byte-by-byte, through time. The archival system makes it possible to migrate the digital data files to new storage media, correct byte-by-byte to the original data files, as new storage media and machines are developed and proven.
The archival system also allows those data to be accessed that are then currently needed, while the archival storage of the data continues on through time, error-free and uncorrupted. The archival system enhances the security of the archived data through physical movement of duplicated archival data storage media to a remote location.